"Tradition?? The only good traditions are food traditions. The rest are repressive."

"There are two
ways to think. The first is to trust to your ancestors, your religious leaders,
or your charismatic professors. The second is to question, to challenge,
to explore history for meanings, and to analyze issues. This latter is called
Critical Thinking, and it is this that is the mission of my web site. "

Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman

August 2016

Russia's Long Romance with Lying and Deception

A spotlight has been turned on Putin's Russia lately: the probability that his government had hacked the computers of the Democratic National Committee, sitting on them until being released the eve of the Democratic Presidential Convention. Their agent, Julian Asange, the creator of WikiLeaks, a hacking underworld that only hacks the computers of the West, never Russia or China, dumped these e-mails with the seeming intent of assisting the election of Donald Trump. Russia certainly could not openly provide this deluge; that is what Asange is for.

This sort of action is not new to Russia, a country that for several centuries has used lies and deception to "win." No wonder there is such a good relationship between Trump and Putin, despite Trump?s own protestation that he had never met Putin. He lied, of course, because he had boasted about meeting Putin when they were both on 60 Minutes! He also boasted that Putin had declared that Trump was a genius. The actual translation of Putin's ironic comment was that Trump was a "character." But both men will do anything to win, dishonest or not.

? Olympic Cheating. The long-suffering Olympic Committee finally had to bite the bullet and ban Russian athletes from participating in this summer?s games. It is about time. A Russian sports doctor fled to west and now lives in hiding. He went public on the procedure that Russia uses to secretly replace their doping athletes? urine samples with clean ones. With the world press looking, the Olympics committee finally had to do something that they have sidestepped for decades.

Winning is so essential to the Russian (and before that, Soviet) government that they have always cheated to guarantee winning gold medals. Russian performers have a huge trove of undeserved medals, most of them during the Soviet period when doping athletes was just suspected. Some of the East German women athletes trained in the Soviet style at one point had to be tested to see if they really were women! Testosterone is a great fixer. North Korea (another Russian client) has gone even further: athletes who do not win are tortured and imprisoned.

? Lysenko's Heritage. In the late 1920s, a Russian scientist, Trofim Lysenko, director of the Soviet Academy of Science, supported Stalin's campaign to declare that Darwin?s evolutionary theory was wrong. Lysenko?s new science insisted that rye could be transformed into barley, weeds could become food grains, and that "natural selection" should be replaced by "Natural cooperation." He declared that if you cut off the tail of a rat, all babies born to that rat would have no tail. Stalin liked this; it went along with Soviet social propaganda. Biology was declared bunk, and Soviet science was exposed to western laughter. Today, Lysenko's attack on science has been adopted by some of our intellectually-dim politicians. Global Warming denial is Neo-Lysenkoism. Darwin is replaced with Kentucky's Noah's Ark Park.

? Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. The secret service of the Russian Empire in 1903 was worried about growing revolutionary fervor among Russia?s educated classes. Rather than address Russia?s repressive government, the agents created a forgery, purporting to be the secret minutes of a Jewish secret society planning to take over and rule the world. This nonsense went global. Henry Ford printed and distributed 500,000 copies and distributed them widely. Adolph Hitler was another advocate, and had it distributed in classrooms throughout Germany.

The fraud was investigated and exposed by The Times (London) in 1921, but their revelation did not deter advocates of this nonsense from continuing to distribute to the gullible. Today, this fraud is available in translations around the world, most popularly in Muslim countries.

When the new state of Israel did not fall into Communist arms in 1947, the Soviet Union turned its attention to the Arab Muslim world and resurrected their original fraud. The Arab translations are readily available throughout the Middle East, adding fuel to the already poisoned conspiracy believers.

Cheating and lying comes so easily to Putin?s Russia that perhaps Lysenko was right: lying and cheating may be inherited traits for Russia?s leaders.

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Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman is a historian, lecturer, and author of God's Law or Man's Law. You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or www.globalthink.net.